Welcome to the Centre for Theology & Philosphy's discussion forum!
The Centre for Theology and Philosophy is on a roll (not literally) with it's new website, located here. As part of the rollout of the new site, we've added a News section as well as this discussion forum at which you're now looking.
On the News section we will be updating you all on the whereabouts of the key players of the Centre as well as the relevant activities of the fellows and members involved. And, when those opportune moments arise (i.e. those with cameras provide their generous spoils), we hope to post pictures of the various events so that you all may see the canvas of faces and vistas represnted by those involved with the Centre.
The Belief and Metaphysics conference is coming up in Granada, Spain from September 15th through the 18th. Conor Cunningham has posted a description and call-for-papers here. Pictures and descriptions of last year's conference are generously provided by James K. A. Smith in this CoTP news posting.
Because this is a discussion forum, I'll see if I can write something provocative:
Within my initial field of study (computer science), all we are taught is efficient methods of organizing data as well as efficient ways of processing this data. We study computer architecture from the ground up so that we can understand how the registers and cache of a CPU work on the low level, but also how to code at the high level which abstracts all of this so that things do what we tell them to do (for the most part).
However, once I entered the "job field" as a web programmer, I was not prepared for having to deal with the sheer "force" of the market that the sales people tell me I have to acknowledge in one way or another. The usual mantras about competition are spoken, the usual business books about figuring out who moved one's 'cheese' are distributed, and even some of the sales people, while one or two graduated from the same Christian university I attended, read from Sun-Tzu's The Art of War on a regular basis so that our 'market share' will be 'maintained.'
Yet, even with the clients we do have, the way in which we are persuaded to retain those clients is not merely talked about in a way that might typically use fear to frighten us into thinking we won't be able to "put food on the table" any longer, but what's seemingly worse is that if we 'lose' some client, then our 'competitors' will snatch them up. And we can't have that. In other words, even to continue on the course of current operations defines itself against the other.
In company meetings, a salesperson slipped up one time and said, "The competition was literally killing each other over this one." While I often smirk at this misuse of the word 'literally,' in this instance, I can't help but wonder if at some ontological level, that the competition really is afflicting real violence upon each other.
With this in mind, does anybody have any thoughts to offer on different ways to think about working within this structure? Considering my company is owned by a larger one that is publically traded (I won't mention which one in this space), I admit that am cynical about attempts at persuading minds to think differently about what a market is. While many of those with whom I work are Christians, equally many are not.
I'm just kind of throwing this out there as a conversation starter. Any thoughts? Anybody with similar experiences? I know those working within the university systems must have experiences not too dissimilar from my own in regards to how management or boards of directors see where that 'bottom line' is.
Peace,
Eric